Internet of Things (IoT)

Provide to people the security they need, the privacy they want, expressed with interactions they find acceptable. Reaching a secure state from the current state requires overcoming very serious gaps. This includes the gap between the cryptographic threat models and user risk preferences; the distance between cryptographic implementations and device capabilities; and between the usability of the devices in the home and expectations of the home’s occupants. The method was an introductory ground-setting keynote followed by intensive collaboration leveraging the participants’ collective expertise.

Phishing

Secure browsing is a high priority and a major interface challenge — specifically threats that are less detectable by the endusers, including phishing. We developed and tested a user-centered solution for phishing detection leveraging machinelearning to implement personalized blocking, probabilisticlogic for evidence fusion and risk communication for userempowerment. The proposed solution is implemented as abrowser extension: the Holistic User-Centered Identificationof Threats (HUCIT). Our prototype provides immediate local identification of phishing websites and blocks unfamiliarscripts, based on machine learning threat detection and userrisk perception.

2FA

Passwords and Multi-Factor Authentication improve security and protect essential data of users online. However, the usage of simple and guessable passwords or compromised credentials often lead to several threats online, such as, Identity Theft, Financial Loss, etc. Irrespective of attacks, such as spear phishing attacks being present known for a long time, users still fall prey and sometimes fail to adapt to newer and safer technologies. One such technology is multi-factor authentication technology where in addition to passwords and username, users can authenticate through a second or third factor of authentication such as, One Time Passwords, SMSes, Tokens, Biometeric, etc. Our researchers investigate through detailed usability and adaptability research to understand user’s mental models and risk perception and unpack the difficulties an individual face to adapt such secure and helpful technologies. Several reasons contribute to lower security practices by an individual, including the ignorance or lack of knowledge of the users but also poor and transparent risk communication from security practitioners and organizations. Our user studies follow qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods and provide actionable items and effective insights which contribute in improving the security practices of individuals and in turn enable protecting the online user data.

E-Crime

The purpose of economics of security has been seen as an empirical and methodological way of understanding security technologies and behaviors. A profoundly different way of viewing economics of security is as a set of design constraints that can impinged acceptability and diffusion of a security protocol, tool, or system. Our research embeds all of these through macroeconomic analyses of ecrime, development of tools to mitigate risk, and using behavioral economics to incentivize individual users to improving the security of systems. Also embedded in our research is advocacy for a paradigm shift to thinking of security as a community resource, i.e., as `club goods' or `common-pool resources'.

Aging in Place

Aging in place means people living in their homes as long as possible as they age. Our early work in aging in place focused on the IoT as grounded in design for elders at home. It has two core projects: our current IoT project and our previous ETHOS project.

PKI

The question that motivates this research is how to understand the interaction of the technical, organizational, and human factors that causes failures in Public Key Infrastructures (PKI). Next generation PKI should integrate a holistic understanding of human and organizational assumptions by design. We need better options for improving PKI in ways that protect privacy and address the contextual nature of trust, taking human behaviors and practices into account.

Soical Network Security

Our research project was a cultural study on WhatsApp users in India. WhatsApp is a mobile messaging platform that contains several privacy challenges, and a scope for better design in privacy communication. The largest population of mobile messaging applications users in India use WhatsApp, yet research on Indian perspectives, and non-western populations in general, towards privacy and security in such networking platforms is sparse. We queried privacy attitudes and behaviors of 213 Indian participants, using both open and closed-ended questions. Majority of participants reported that they actively use the privacy controls, on multiple data types, especially in group communications. Note that, in India groups are sometimes used for in schools and workplaces. We consider our ﬁndings and propose recommendations like including more reﬁned access control in groups, better privacy communication and speciﬁc culturally sensitive privacy defaults.

BGP

The Internet, as a network of networks, is also a network of trust. The most clear instantiation of that trust is the updating of router tables based on unsubstantiated announcements. The positive result of this trust is that the network can be extremely responsive to failures, and recovery quickly. Yet the very trust that enables resilience creates risks from behavior lacking either technical competence or benevolence. Threats to the control plane have included political interference, misguided network configurations, and other mischief. Our goal is to classify route updates along a continuum of trust, exploring new algorithms that will give a measure of integrity assurance to BGP updates. We will explore the application of machine learning techniques with the variety of data available (technical, rates of change, economic, and geopolitical) as network topology is changed via BGP updates in order to generate probabilistic (not cryptographic) trust indicators for those changes.

Insider Threat

Evaluating software quality and productivity is an open research challenge. In the past, expertise and ownership measures have shown to be effective in determining software quality, but most of the variance in software production can be neither consistently explained under our current measures in organizations. Past characterization of the individual actions of developers on software quality excludes the role of their interactions on overall performance. Yet, the intrinsically temporal nature of interactions create different collective behaviors that need to be understood in the light of failure data. Our goal is to characterize the collective character of software developers and its relationship to software failures. There is evidence suggesting that the improvement of software quality reduces the number of security vulnerabilities enhancing software security. We will explore the use of new algorithms that take into account the inner social structure of developers, ones that measure organizational context, to measure the integrity of their interactions with software components. In particular, we will apply a range of graph and data analytics techniques with a variety of data available (intrinsic characteristics of developers and software components, failures by components, and temporal logs of interactions) to evaluate the efficacy of graph topology in generating probabilistic trust indicators for the code resulting from these interactions. The proposed analysis will allow to understand the necessary conditions for addressing security vulnerabilities (as those posed by insiders) improving software quality.

Passwords

Passwords are the primary, most widely used single sign-on and multiple point authentication scheme adapted across the globe. Our research looks at not only how people create and use passwords, but also at external factors that may influence their behavior, such as to what extent changes in password policies and in system requirements impact password usage and reuse.

Sustainability

Concerns regarding the environment and the impact humans constantly have on the environment has been a growing concern for decades, but there is still a substantial lack of environmental literacy and action among most of the population in what they can do to reduce the damage they may be indirectly causing. The environmental impact of technology usage continues to garner attention as fears of built in obsolescence and high turn over of devices contribute to larger negative impacts. Our research aims at increasing environmental literacy and awareness along with giving users actionable steps and interactions to empower their control of individual carbon output and carbon footprints.

SDN

What are the challenges, threats, implications and potential for SDN in terms of creating a resilient network? To answer this question, we have created clear threat models grounded in documented and realistic use cases; extracted resulting enumerated authentication requirements; implemented one case of the necessary next-generation network modeling to evaluate authentication interactions, such that the models address all layers from physical to human; and finally the demonstrated practical forward movement to meeting these challenges as an open source network component named Bongo.

CSec_CRA

Models for Enabling Continuous Reconfigurability of Secure Missions, a five-year, $23.2 million cooperative agreement, will form a collaborative research alliance consisting of Indiana University, Penn State, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California Davis, University of California Riverside and the Army Research Laboratory.